Good News Friday

Yea, boycott Isreal but watch this video first. I wish the sentiments of this video, which is thoroughly enjoyable, were made available to all. It simply cannot be denied that Israel is singled out for special criticism and the litany of injustices portrayed in this video is a remedy for that.

Also, it is unfortunate that the news about the Nobel Prize winners has to be turned into nationalism. I happen to know members of the Warshel family and they would not appreciate the focus of the announcements about the award to be so blatantly nationalistic. Professor Warshel is immensely talented and I’m sure deserving but we can never ignore influences and the complex networks of people who make a difference in our work.

Warshel, 72, is a distinguished professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where he has been since the 1970s.

Fellow winner Michael Levitt, a South Africa-born professor, immigrated to Israel in 1979, married here and taught at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot for most of the 1980s. Vienna-born Martin Karplus fled the Nazi occupation of Austria as a child in 1938.

Of the 23 chemistry Nobels awarded in the past decade, 11 of the winners were…

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